Got a problem in merging

[YangYY]

Hi,

I have a data set "world" which include 256 countries and continent. And another data set "have" include 125 countries and other variable. Now I want to attach the continent information to data"have".

So my code is

proc sort data=world;
by country;
run;

proc sort data=have;
by country;
run;

data attached;
merge have world;
by country;
run;

And the result is something like

   country        variables      continent

1 Armenia             22                 .

2  China                 15                   .

3  Korea               5                   .

...

126  Armenia         .                 Asia

127  China            .                 Asia

128  Korea            .                 Asia

What I want is

 country        variables      continent

1 Armenia             22                 Asia

2  China                 15                Asia

3  Korea               5                   Asia

...

Does my code have problem ?? Anyone could modify my code to get what I want? 

THANK YOU

[PGStats]

It looks like the country names don't really match. Maybe you have invisible characters (tabs?) or leading spaces as part of the country names in one of the datasets.

[YangYY]

I checked the output data and I did not see the countries have leading space(for both of them). How should I modify my code to solve this problem??

Thank you

[ed_sas_member]

Have you checked if your country variable has a format?

you can run a proc contents to see that as follows :

proc contents data= have ;
run;
proc contents data= world ;
run;

[YangYY]

I don't think they have a format. What format they are supposed to have? How should I add a format to them?

[Kurt_Bremser]

---

@YangYY wrote:

I don't think they have a format.

---

Don't think. KNOW. Run proc contents. This will reveal types, lengths and formats.

If you do a join or merge on character variables, they must have identical values. This means the join is case-sensitive.

How did you inspect your columns? The best way to find erratic characters is to create a new variable where you store the hex coding.

Suppose your country column has a length of 10, then do this (in both datasets):

length country_hex $20;
country_hex = put(country, $hex20.);

Then you can have a very clear picture of the contents.

[Astounding]

Examine the results by running a PROC PRINT without then with this statement:

format country $hex32.;

[YangYY · Accepted solution]

I have found a solution with using the strip function to remove the leading blank. So SAS can recognize two countries variables are the same and the merge would work.